How to Avoid Speaking is the latest winner of the prestigious Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was selected from almost 500 submissions by the English poet, Anthony Thwaite.

The collection is a catalogue of phobias, an exploration of sound and strange noises, which begins with the first confrontation with language and ends with a voice beyond the dead. It is a space where Brad Pitt becomes a 16th century anatomical drawing, where a Hemingway story melts under the threat of global warming, where Derrida agonizes over eating a Dorito.

Through verse forms both innovative and traditional, Jaimee Hill's debut collection explores a philosophy of the awkward, and the memento mori, in an investigation of what it means to own a body and speak through it.